This NSF Science and Society Dissertation Improvement Grant in the History of Science will allow the co-PI to visit archives in Edinburgh and throughout the United Kingdom in order to investigate the unpublished papers of Charles Bell and his contemporaries. In the early nineteenth century, two physiologists, Charles Bell and Francois Magendie, became embroiled in a debate over the proper practice of physiology, a debate that emerged within the context of a priority dispute over the discovery of the separate roots of motor and sensory nerves. The dispute, which began in 1822, lasted for over twenty years and was not settled decisively within either Bell's or Magendie's lifetime. This priority dispute provides an entry point for an evaluation of connections between medical institutions and physiology and between pedagogy and research practice in nineteenth-century Britain. It allows for a discussion of ways in which British physiologists responded to competing models of experimentation in early medical sciences. Moreover, this controversy illuminates the ways in which communities of physiologists made sense of living bodies and the ways in which theory and practice were taken to be mutually supportive elements of discovery. More specifically research supported under the NSF dissertation support will allow the following questions to be answered: how did a debate over priority and experimentation embody divergent pedagogical cultures and alternative models for a discipline in formation? In what ways did the structures of British medical and surgical institutions lend themselves to a particular pedagogical style, publishing priorities, and perceived audience revealed by Bell? And can we identify wider political contexts for the role of vivisection or the role of experimental science in clinical medicine that help to explain the significance of this controversy to Bell's contemporaries? The intellectual impacts of this work include shedding light on the role of pedagogy in the establishment of research methodologies in the biological sciences; enhancing understandings of the ways in which natural philosophy and early science were incorporated into medicine; and exploring alternative models of experimentation. Furthermore, it will discuss the place of pedagogy within the print culture of the early nineteenth century. It will also have broader impacts by contributing to the training of a historian of science; it will produce an understanding of the politics and ethics of the early uses of vivisection both in research and in educational contexts; it will examine the role of nationalist politics in the resolution of priority disputes, and it will contribute to an understanding of the intertwined debates about ethical and technical aspects of research practice. Although much work has been done on continental physiology and medical sciences, British life sciences of the early nineteenth century remain understudied. The priority dispute between Bell and Magendie, which helped to unite British anatomists, promises to reveal the philosophical, professional, and pedagogical of a natural philosophical culture struggling over the place of experimentation in medical science. The fierce rivalry between French and British philosophers seen through this dispute serves to indicate that a British model of physiology provided serious competition for the French experimental model and merits further study.
